Gates withheld criticism until Obama re-elected

Why? Money? How else to explain his silence given the revelations in his memoir, Duty.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was outraged that the Commander-in-Chief he served authorized a surge of troops in Afghanistan while only being interested in getting out. Gates was shocked that President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton openly admitted in a cabinet meeting that their opposition to the surge in Iraq under President George W. Bush while senators was political. At the time. And oh yes, only the second Republican in the Democratic Administration’s cabinet considered Vice President Joe Biden to have been wrong on “every major foreign policy and national security issue”.

Who knew? Thanks to Gates’ silence, at the time in 2010, and through the election of 2012, not enough Americans voting on whether to re-elect the Democratic ticket.

Bob Woodward, another author who regularly withholds news about Presidents until its relevant (albeit via access agreements as journalist and not a cabinet officer sworn to defend the United States, reports the details that Gates:

“…writing that by early 2010 he had concluded the president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

TRENDING ON JOEFORAMERICA.COM

Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.”

Obama, after months of contentious discussion with Gates and other top advisers, deployed 30,000 more troops in a final push to stabilize Afghanistan before a phased withdrawal beginning in mid-2011. “I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission,” Gates writes.

And of course, the gratuitous “he cared for the troops.” Reminds of how neither fellow Republicans John McCain nor Mitt Romney could pronounce J*e*r*e*m*i*a*h W*r*i*g*h*t when it mattered.

The defense of Biden:

It was an outrage when Joe Biden and much of the Democratic Party gutted the military after Vietnam, supported the nuclear freeze and otherwise appeased the Soviet Union. It was an outrage when Democratic party Senators Obama and Clinton voted twice to de-fund troops in field after 9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it was an outrage for the Obama Administration to appease Syria, Iran, Russia, terrorists in Benghazi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. A majority of Americans seeing all that should have refused to re-elect he and Biden; and never elect a Democrat since JFK to lead U.S. national security policy.

And we can think of no “duty” why the revelations in “Duty” shouldn’t have been the subject of a news conference after Bob Gates should have resigned in 2010, knowing the derelictions of duty he saw behind the scenes in 2010.

In 2008 my life changed when Barack Obama came into my front yard on a campaign stop. I asked him why he wanted to raise taxes, and he said that he wanted to “spread the wealth.” Since then, I have gained a national following as “Joe the Plumber” and now travel the country speaking and encouraging other everyday folks to get involved in the political process.